Indiana University's Terry Hoeppner 'can't wait' to get back to football season

August 02, 2006|JASON KELLY

CHICAGO -- Terry Hoeppner, the introspective Indiana football coach always quick with a reference to his most recent inspirational reading, learned an important lesson about his obsessive profession during the offseason. It's not exactly brain surgery. If any coach could have been accused of having "perspective," that intangible characteristic they all talk about but rarely display, it was Hoeppner. Football consumed him as much as any of them, but he coated it in an infectious enthusiasm. When other coaches stressed about playing 12 regular-season games, he wondered why not 13? Ernie Banks in a headset. Hoeppner couldn't get enough. Still can't. What he endured over the last eight months only strengthened that endearing trait, as his rah-rah interview session Tuesday at Big Ten media day illustrated. "Can't wait! Can't wait! Next Monday! Get to coach football again! Yes!" Hoeppner said, and he had more reason than most to revel in the prospect of another season. A scar formed an arc above his right ear at the spot of the incision to remove a brain tumor. Hair like a two-day growth of beard bristled through his shorn scalp -- a look, he pointed out, that improved his times in the pool. He went from a headache on Christmas Eve to the operating Jason Kelly Commentary room three days later, a jarring disruption to the orderly and demanding life of a coach more accustomed to fast-forward than pause. "I got punched in the mouth," Hoeppner said. "Hey, you need to slow down and not go 24-7-365, and I did. I had to." Slowing down meant missing all of four days in the office after brain surgery, "so it's just degrees of what you do, and an appreciation," he said. When his grandson wants to play in the pool, Hoeppner dives in with him instead of going hip deep into video to prepare for games still weeks or months away. If his health scare felt like a punch in the mouth, his summer included an uppercut to the gut and a broken heart. His former quarterback at Miami (Ohio), Ben Roethlisberger, suffered serious injuries in a motorcycle accident. Hoeppner rushed to Pittsburgh to see him and felt as much relief over his recovery as he would have with his own child. Then the worst news of all, delivered over the phone his wife brought out to him while he relaxed on the deck. Randy Walker, the Northwestern coach, Hoeppner's predecessor at Miami, a mentor and a friend, died of a heart attack at age 52. "I almost fell down," Hoeppner said. Under the weight of everything that had befallen him, it would have been an understandable reaction. Except Hoeppner had nourished his psyche with all those coaching maxims and he felt an obligation to live them once circumstances challenged him. "No problems, just opportunities," he said. "It's how you respond, as 'Walk' would say." Before embarking on the comforting routine of football season, the calm after the storm, he played a round of golf with Roethlisberger and Arnold Palmer. For the record, Roethlisberger boomed his first drive about 370 yards and birdied the hole, but Hoeppner remembered the occasion for the ways it reflected the subtle change in their relationship. "Ben and I, we always hug, but we saw each other a couple Thursdays ago and we hugged a little more than we would have," he said. "It hasn't changed my perspectives, it's just emboldened the ones that I had and made them even more important to me." Passion for football included. Hoeppner kept fizzing over his team's improved speed, and recited a lesson from the book "Good to Great", which sounded like an advanced title for Indiana football. It did have a fitting theme, as Hoeppner described it. "You should never lose hope," he said, "but if you're going to be successful, if you're going to become great, you've also got to face the cold, hard realities of your circumstances." This time last year people thought Hoeppner might be crazy for leaving Miami to wade into the quicksand of Indiana football. He experienced the cold, hard realities of a 4-7 season with only one Big Ten win. Real life intruded and those struggles became trivial by comparison, but in that relentless good-natured way of his, he had to admit the skeptics were on to something. "All those people that said I needed my head examined," Hoeppner said, "they were right."